The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (80 page)

“To you? For you.”

“You made me feel something for a woman who fucked for money. Who had her mind fucked for money.”

“So did you, if you think about. Just at one remove.”

“I didn’t.”

“So, what, you did it for science?”

Cody changed direction. “Does Susana know?”

“I’m flying to Atlanta tomorrow.”

“Do you have her sound files with you?”

“Of course.”

“Let me hear them.”

“That would be unethical.”

Unethical. “I think you might be a monster,” she said, but without heat.

“I have a strange way of showing it, then, wouldn’t you say? For the price of a few embarrassing experimental sessions you won’t ever remember, I won you a contract, a girlfriend and a night on the town.”

She stared at him. “You expect me to be grateful . . .”

“Well, look at this place. Look at it. Bare walls. Fish, for god’s sake.”

“Get out.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Out.”

“By tomorrow it will all fall into perspective.”

“I swear to god, if you don’t leave now I’ll break your face.” She sounded so weirdly calm. Was this shock, or was it just how people in love, or whatever, behaved? She had no idea. “And you can put those papers down. They’re mine, my private thoughts. Leave them right there on the table. The thumbdrive, too.”

He pulled the drive, laid it on the papers, stowed his laptop and stood. She held the door open for him.

He was halfway through the door when she said, “Richard. You can’t tell Susana like this.”

“No?”

“It’s too much of a shock.”

“You seem to be coping admirably.”

“At least I already knew you. Or thought I did. You’ll be a complete stranger to her. You can’t. You just can’t. It’s . . . inhumane. And she’s so young.”

“Young? Don’t make me laugh. She makes you look like an infant.” He walked away.

Cookie danced. She didn’t want to think about the phone call. Didn’t want to think about any of it. Creep.

But there was the money.

The lights were hot, but the air conditioning cold. Her skin pebbled.

“Yo, darlin’, let’s you and me go to the back room,” the suit with the moustache and bad tie said. He was drunk. She knew the type. He’d slip his hands from the chair, try to cop a feel, get pissed off when she called in Danny, refuse to pay.

“Well, now,” she said, in her special honey voice. “Let’s see if you’ve got the green,” and pushed her breasts together invitingly. He flicked a bill across her breasts. “A five won’t buy you much, baby.”

“Five’ll buy you, babydoll,” he said, hamming for his table buddies. One of them giggled. Ugly sound in a man, Cookie thought. “Five’ll buy you five times!”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that, honey?”

“The fuck?” He looked confused.

“I said, your brain must be smaller than your dick which I’d guess is even smaller than your wallet, only I doubt that’s possible,” and she plucked the bill from his fingers, snapped it under her g-string and walked away.

In the dressing room she looked at herself in the mirror. Twenty-four was too old for this. Definitely. She had no idea what time it was.

She stuck her head out of the door. “Danny!”

“Yes, doll.”

“Time is it?” She’d have to get herself a watch someday. A nice expensive watch.

“Ten after,” Danny said.

“After what?”

“Ten.”

Three hours earlier on the West Coast. She stacked her night’s take, counted it, thought for a minute, peeled off two hundred in fives and ones. She stuck her head out of the door again. “Danny!”

“Here, doll.”

“I’m gone.”

“You sick?” He ambled up the corridor, stood breathing heavily by the door.

“Sick of this.”

“Mister Pergoletti says—”

“You tell Pergoletti to stick it. I’m gone. Seriously.” She handed him the wad of bills. “You take care of these girls, now. And have a good life.”

“Got something else lined up?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

There was one bottle of beer in Cody’s fridge. She opened it, poured it carefully into a glass, stared at the beige foam. A glass: she never drank beer from a glass. She poured it down the sink. She had no idea what was real anymore but she was pretty sure alcohol would only make things worse.

She made green tea instead and settled down in the window seat. The sun hung low over the bay. What did Susana see from her apartment? Was her ankle better? Contraceptive pills, Jesus. And, oh, the smell of her skin.

She was losing her mind.

She didn’t know who she hated more: Richard for making the proposal, or herself for accepting it. Or Susana. Susana had done it for money.

Or maybe . . . But what about those contraceptive pills?

And what if Susana did feel . . . whatever it was? Did that make it real? It was all an experiment, all engineered. Fake.

But it didn’t feel fake. She wanted to cradle Susana, kiss her ankle better, protect her from the world. The Richards of the world.

She picked up the phone, remembered for the tenth time she had neither address nor phone number. She called information, who told her there was no listing under Susana Herrera in the Atlanta Metro area. She found herself unsurprised, though surprised at how little it mattered.

She got the number for the Golden Key instead.

A man called Pergoletti answered. “Cookie? She’s gone. They always go.” The music thumped. Cody’s insides vibrated in sympathy, remembering.

“ – don’t have a number. Hey, you interested in a job?”

Cody put the phone down carefully. Sipped her tea. Picked up the phone again, and called Richard.

It was open mic night at Coffee to the People. Richard was in the back room on a sofa, as far from the music as possible. Two cups on the table. One still full.

“You knew I’d call.”

“I did.”

“Did you program that, too?”

“I didn’t program anything. I primed you – and only about the sex.” He patted the sofa. “Sit down before you fall down.”

She sat. Blinked. “Give me her phone number.”

“I can’t. She gave me a fake. I called her at the club, but she hung up on me.” He seemed put out.

“What does she know?”

“I talked fast. I don’t know how much she heard. But I told her she wouldn’t get the rest of the money until we’d done follow up.”

The singer in the other room sang of love and broken hearts. It was terrible, but it made Cody want to cry anyway.

“How long does it last?”

“Love? I don’t know. I avoid it where possible.”

“What am I going to do?”

Richard lifted his laptop bag. “I planned for this eventuality.” He took out a small white cardboard box. He opened it, shook something onto his hand. A grey plastic inhaler.

“What is it?”

“A vasopressin analogue, formulated to block oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens. That is, the antidote.”

They both looked at it.

“It works in voles,” he said. “Female voles.”

Voles. “You said it tasted bad.”

“I’ve used it. Just in case. I prefer my sex without complications. And I’ve had a lot of sex and never once fallen in love.” He arched his eyebrows. “So, hey, it must work.”

The elephant whistle hypothesis. Hey, Bob, what’s that whistle? Well, Fred, it keeps elephants away. Don’t be an asshole, Bob, there aren’t any elephants around here. Well, Fred, that’s because of my whistle.

“Cody.” He did his best to look sincere. “I’m so very sorry. I never thought it would work. Not like this. But I do think the antidote might work.” His face went back to normal. He hefted the inhaler. “Though before I give it to you, I have a favor to ask.”

She stared at him. “On what planet do I owe you anything?”

“For science, then. A follow up scan, and then another after you take the antidote.”

“Maybe I won’t take it. Give me the number.”

“Love is a form of insanity, you know.”

“The number.”

In the other room, the bad singing went on and on.

“Oh, all right. For old times’ sake.” He extracted a folder from his bag, and a piece of paper from the folder. He slid it across the table towards her, put the inhaler on top of it.

She nudged the inhaler aside, picked up the paper. Hand written. Susana’s writing.

“Love’s just biochemical craziness,” he said, “designed to make us take a leap in the dark, to trust complete strangers. It’s not rational.”

Cody said nothing.

“She screwed us.”

“She screwed you,” Cody said. “Maybe she fell in love with me.” But she took the inhaler.

Cody sat in the window seat with the phone and the form Susana had filled in. Every now and again she punched in a different combination of the numbers Susana had written and got the Cannot be completed as dialed voice. Every now and again she touched the form with the tip of her middle finger; she could feel the indentation made by Susana’s strong strokes. Strong strokes, strong hands, strong mouth.

She didn’t think about the grey inhaler in its white box, which she had put in the fridge – to stay viable a long time, just in case.

After a while she stopped dialing and simply waited.

When her phone lit up at 11:46 she knew who it was – even before she saw the 404 area code on the screen.

“Do you feel it?” Susana said.

“Yes,” and Cody did. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it was there, as indelible as ink. She wanted to say, I don’t know if this is real, I don’t know if it’s good. She wanted to ask, Had you ever had sex with anyone for money before me? and Does it matter? She wanted to know, Have you ever loved anyone before? and, How can you know?

She wanted to say, Will it hurt?

Walking through the crowds at the airport, Cody searched for the familiar face, felt her heart thump every time she thought she saw her. Panic, or love? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything except that her throat ached.

Someone jostled her with his bag, and when she looked up, there was the back of that head, that smooth brown hair, so familiar, after just one night, and all her blood vessels seemed to expand at once, every cell leap forward.

She didn’t move. This was it, the last moment. This was where she could just let the crowd carry her past, carry her away, out into the night. Walk away. Go home. Use the inhaler in the fridge.

That was the sensible thing. But the Cody who had hung from the ninth storey balcony, the Cody who had risked the Atlanta contract without a second thought, that Cody thought, fuck it, and stepped forward.

You couldn’t know. You could never know.

BLOCKED

Geoff Ryman

Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in
Interzone
with his brilliant novella
The Unconquered Country
, that he first attracted any serious attention.
The Unconquered Country
, one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version,
The Unconquered Country: A Life History.
His output has been sparse since then, by the high-production standards of the genre, but extremely distinguished, with his short fiction appearing frequently in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
and his novel
The Child Garden: A Low Comedy
winning both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W Campbell Memorial Award; his later novel
Air
also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include
The Warrior Who Carried Life
, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel
Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust
, and the underground cult classic
253
, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel,” which in its original form ran online on Ryman’s home page of ryman.com, and which, in its print form, won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in
Unconquered Countries.
His most recent book is the anthology
When It Changed.

Here he gives us the fascinating story of an Uplifted animal in a strange future world who is trying to take care of his adopted human family, and finding that he needs to make some very hard choices along the way.

I
DREAMED THIS IN
Sihanoukville, a town of new casinos, narrow beaches, hot bushes with flowers that look like daffodils, and even now after nine years of peace, stark ruined walls with gates that go nowhere.

In the dream, I get myself a wife. She’s beautiful, blonde, careworn. She is not used to having a serious man with good intentions present himself to her on a beach. Her name is Agnete and she speaks with a Danish accent. She has four Asian children.

Their father had been studying permanently in Europe, married Agnete and then “left,” which in this world can mean several things. Agnete was an orphan herself and the only family she had was that of her Cambodian husband. So she came to Phnom Penh only to find that her in-laws did not want some strange woman they did not know and all those extra mouths to feed.

I meet the children. The youngest is Gerda, who cannot speak a word of Khmer. She’s tiny, as small as infant though three years old, in a splotched pink dress and too much toy jewellery. She just stares, while her brothers play. She’s been picked up from everything she knows and thrown down into this hot, strange world in which people speak nonsense and the food burns your mouth.

I kneel down and try to say hello to her, first in German, and then in English. Hello Gertie, hello little girl. Hello. She blanks all language and sits like she’s sedated.

I feel so sad, I pick her up and hold her, and suddenly she buries her head in my shoulder. She falls asleep on me as I swing in a hammock and quietly explain myself to her mother. I am not married, I tell Agnete. I run the local casino.

Real men are not hard, just unafraid. If you are a man you say what is true, and if someone acts like a monkey, then maybe you punish them. To be a crook, you have to be straight. I sold guns for my boss and bought policemen, so he trusted me, so I ran security for him for years. He was one of the first to Go, and he sold his shares in the casino to me. Now it’s me who sits around the black lacquered table with the generals and Thai partners. I have a Lexus and a good income. I have ascended and become a man in every way but one. Now I need a family.

Across from Sihanoukville, all about the bay are tiny islands. On those islands, safe from thieves, glow the roofs where the Big Men live in Soriya-chic amid minarets, windmills, and solar panels. Between the islands hang white suspension footbridges. Distant people on bicycles move across them.

Somehow it’s now after the wedding. The children are now mine. We loll shaded in palm-leaf panel huts. Two of the boys play on a heap of old rubber inner tubes. Tharum with his goofy smile and sticky-out ears is long-legged enough to run among them, plonking his feet down into the donut holes. Not to be outdone, his brother Sampul clambers over the things. Rith the oldest looks cool in a hammock, away with his earphones, pretending not to know us.

Gerda tugs at my hand until I let her go. Freed from the world of language and adults she climbs up and over the swollen black tubes, sliding down sideways. She looks intent and does not laugh.

Her mother in a straw hat and sunglasses makes a thin, watery sunset smile.

Gerda and I go wading. All those islands shelter the bay, so the waves roll onto the shore child-sized, as warm and gentle as caresses. Gerda holds onto my hand and looks down at them, scowling in silence.

Alongside the beach is a grounded airliner, its wings cut away and neatly laid beside it. I take the kids there, and the boys run around inside it, screaming. Outside, Gerda and I look at the aircraft’s spirit house. Someone witty has given the shrine tiny white wings.

The surrounding hills still have their forests, cumulo-nimbus clouds towering over them like clenched fists.

In the evening, thunder comes.

I look out from our high window and see flashes of light in the darkness. We live in one whole floor of my casino hotel. Each of the boys has his own suite. The end rooms have balconies, three of them, that run all across the front of the building with room enough for sofas and dining tables. We hang tubes full of pink sugar water for hummingbirds. In the mornings, the potted plants buzz with bees, and balls of seed lure the sarika bird that comes to sing its sweetest song.

In these last days, the gambling action is frenetic: Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Malays, they play baccarat mostly, but some prefer the one-armed bandits.

At the tables of my casino, elegant young women, handsome young men and a couple of other genders besides, sit upright ready to deal, looking as alert and frightened as rabbits, especially if their table is empty. They are paid a percentage of the take. Some of them sleep with customers too, but they’re good kids; they always sent the money home. Do good, get good, we in Cambodia used to say. Now we say, Twee akrow meen lay. Do bad, have money.

My casino is straight. My wheels turn true. No guns, says my sign. No animals, no children. Innocence must be protected. No cigarettes or powders. Those last two are marked by a skull-and-crossbones.

We have security but the powders don’t show up on any scan, so some of my customers come here to die. Most weekends, we find one, a body slumped over the table.

I guess some of them think it’s good to go out on a high. The Chinese are particularly susceptible. They love the theatre of gambling, the tough-guy stance, the dance of the cigarette, the nudge of the eyebrow. You get dealt a good hand, you smile, you take one last sip of Courvoisier, then one sniff. You Go Down for good.

It’s another way for the winner to take all. For me, they are just a mess to clear up, another reason to keep the kids away.

Upstairs, we’ve finished eating and we can hear the shushing of the sea.

“Daddy,” Sampul asks me and the word thrums across my heart. “Why are we all leaving?”

“We’re being invaded.”

So far, this has been a strange and beautiful dream, full of Buddhist monks in orange robes lined up at the one-armed bandits. But now it goes like a stupid kids’ TV show, except that in my dream, I’m living it, it’s real. As I speak, I can feel my own sad, damp breath.

“Aliens are coming,” I say and kiss him. “They are bringing many many ships.

“We can see them now, at the edge of the solar system. They’ll be here in less than two years.”

He sighs and looks perturbed.

In this disrupted country two-thirds of everything is a delight, two-thirds of everything iron nastiness. The numbers don’t add up, but it’s true.

“How do we know they’re bad?” he asks, his face puffy.

“Because the government says so and the government wouldn’t lie.”

His breath goes icy. “This government would.”

“Not all governments, not all of them all together.”

“So. Are we going to leave?”

He means leave again. They left Denmark to come here, and they are all of them sick of leaving.

“Yes, but we’ll all go together, OK?”

Rith glowers at me from the sofa. “It’s all the fault of people like you.”

“I made the aliens?” I think smiling at him will make him see he is being silly.

He rolls his eyes. “There’s the comet?” he asks like I’ve forgotten something and shakes his head.

“Oh, the comet, yes, I forgot about the comet, there’s a comet coming too. And global warming and big new diseases.”

He tuts. “The aliens sent the comet. If we’d had a space programme we could meet them halfway and fight there. We could of had people living in Mars, to survive.”

“Why wouldn’t the aliens invade Mars too?”

His voice goes smaller, he hunches even tighter over his game. “If we’d gone into space, we would of been immortal.”

My father was a drunk who left us; my mother died; I took care of my sisters. The regime made us move out of our shacks by the river to the countryside where there was no water so that the generals could build their big hotels. We survived. I never saw a movie about aliens, I never had this dream of getting away to outer space. My dream was to become a man.

I look out over the Cambodian night, and fire and light dance about the sky like dragons at play. There’s a hissing sound. Wealth tumbles down in the form of rain.

Sampul is the youngest son and is a tough little guy. He thumps Rith, who’s 15 years old and both of them gang up on gangly Tharum. But tough-guy Sampul suddenly curls up next to me on the sofa as if he’s returning to the egg.

The thunder’s grief looks like rage. I sit and listen to the rain. Rith plays on, his headphones churning with the sound of stereophonic war.

Everything dies, even suns; even the universe dies and comes back. We already are immortal.

Without us, the country people will finally have Cambodia back. The walled gardens will turn to vines. The water buffalo will wallow; the rustics will still keep the fields green with rice, as steam engines chortle past, puffing out gasps of cloud. Sampul once asked me if the trains made rain.

And if there are aliens, maybe they will treasure it, the Earth.

I may want to stay, but Agnete is determined to Go. She has already lost one husband to this nonsense. She will not lose anything else, certainly not her children. Anyway, it was all part of the deal.

I slip into bed next to her. “You’re very good with them,” she says and kisses my shoulder. “I knew you would be. Your people are so kind to children.”

“You don’t tell me that you love me,” I say.

“Give it time,” she says, finally.

That night lightning strikes the spirit house that shelters our neak ta. The house’s tiny golden spire is charred.

Gerda and I come down in the morning to give the spirit his bananas, and when she sees the ruin, her eyes boggle and she starts to scream and howl.

Agnete comes downstairs, and hugs and pets her, and says in English, “Oh, the pretty little house is broken.”

Agnete cannot possibly understand how catastrophic this is, or how baffling. The neak ta is the spirit of the hotel who protects us or rejects us. What does it mean when the sky itself strikes it? Does it mean the neak ta is angry and has deserted us? Does it mean the gods want us gone and have destroyed our protector?

Gerda stares in terror, and I am sure then, that though she is wordless, Gerda has a Khmer soul.

Agnete looks at me over Gerda’s shoulder, and I’m wondering why she is being so disconnected when she says, “The papers have come through.”

That means we will sail to Singapore within the week.

I’ve already sold the casino. There is no one I trust. I go downstairs and hand over the keys to all my guns to Sreang, who I know will stay on as security at least for a while.

That night after the children are asleep, Agnete and I have the most terrifying argument. She throws things; she hits me; she thinks I’m saying that I want to desert them; I cannot make her listen or understand.

“Neak ta? Neak ta, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I think we should go by road.”

“We don’t have time! There’s the date, there’s the booking! What are you trying to do?” She is panicked, desperate; her mouth ringed with thin strings of muscle, her neck straining.